


as old as your omens

by inianuae



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst and Feels, Crimson Flower Route, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Multi, Other, Post-Canon, no beta we die like Glenn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-19 09:42:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29748606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inianuae/pseuds/inianuae
Summary: Edelgard's war for humanity changed the face of Fódlan for the better, but time betrays. Generations after the events of Crimson Flower, her wife and their friends long since passed on, Byleth finally finds the only family she has left: Flayn, who may or may not forgive her for the sacrifices she made to build a new world.
Relationships: Edelgard von Hresvelg/My Unit | Byleth, Flayn & My Unit | Byleth
Comments: 11
Kudos: 58





	as old as your omens

For a while after Edelgard died, she stayed in their home. It stood still: a whitewashed house of stone in the hills by the sea, its once-loved gardens badly overgrown, in need of new windows and new tiles for the roof for at least sixty years. One of the grandchildren looked in on it, sometimes—one of the great-grandchildren? Not theirs. A friend’s, though she thought of all of them and none of them as hers. But she hadn’t been able to bear it, after a while, the table too large for the two of them where they had so often hosted old friends, the spare rooms where one set of children or another had played on visits, the little low wall where they had shared tea and cakes and laughter in the years after the two of them abdicated the throne and left it to—well, one of the children. One of Annette’s star students, as she recalled, unless that was the next one. No: it was definitely one of Marianne’s, with all her mother’s command of the diplomatic arts and confidence instilled by any number of loving aunts and uncles. The next was one of the children Mercedes had raised, she was sure of that. It had been a while since she had participated in the elections. She couldn’t say who now sat in Adrestia’s parliamentary halls.

Regardless, eventually, it was too much. She had permitted a relatively modest cenotaph for an Emperor, in the hills behind the house, with a less bombastic inscription than the one on the plinth beneath her grand statue in the capital. It was their home, after all, and ought to be as quiet as their happiest years had been.

Their little family had grown, over the years, before it began to get smaller once again. Eventually, there was simply the problem of time. Age, illness, a foolish riding accident—one by one, their dear ones had gone. Lysithea got many years back, but not enough; Sylvain insisted on that goodwill voyage to Sreng even with a storm closing in. Linhardt had finally gotten all the rest he could want, and Caspar had gone more quietly than anyone expected. Yuri didn’t seem to get much older, but had gotten restless after too many years fighting the same fights, and had gone abroad—Morfis, she thought she’d heard last. Hubert had an old wound from an Agarthan knife that had festered eventually, and surprised them all with his tenderness in the letters he’d written to each of them at the end—one last contingency, one last sharing of the unspeakable and secret. Dorothea’s funeral cortege had gone for more than a mile, by the end of that summer day, led by children and grandchildren adopted with more love than anyone could hope for—down a street named for her in a city where no one had had to sleep without a roof or a meal in many years. Petra’s descendants still cared for Brigid across the water, though the ones who had visited their beloved aunts’ cottage in the hills by the sea had long since gone to the pyre of honor themselves. 

For a time after the home she shared with her beloved El became too much, Byleth wandered. She visited loved ones too young to have known her well, met with old friends in Almyra, spent eight months in Derdriu listening to the waves lap against the canals. She took a steam ship to Dagda, just to see it, before she became too homesick, and then one of those strange carriages old Hanneman had devised to Fhirdiad, a city grown over its scars, narrow-windowed walls of new buildings clad in pale granite. For a few years, she tried to teach at Garreg Mach, long since made over into the jewel of Ferdinand’s lyceum system. Much of it had been closed to the public, the residences replaced decades back with taller ones, the Holy Tomb sealed off and consigned to legend once Linhardt had his fill of studying its secrets. She had fallen in love there, once; her memory of the monastery's layout was so clear she could almost walk through new walls built where there had been none, hear hymns that hadn’t been sung in a century echoing off the vaults of the ceilings. Some of the students so resembled students she had taught before, but the books had changed, and the names, and there was only so much a curriculum could bend to a professor who had lived through so much history. She moved on.

Her dark hair had started to streak with a pale green, even as their living friends’ had gone gray and El’s had stayed soft and white as clean wool; it had troubled her wife, in those last years, but nothing felt different, then, to explain it. There was little left now of the teal of her youth, though her skin betrayed barely a wrinkle—but for the few her smiles had written around her eyes, in those years in the house in the hills by the sea. Once she left the school again, she found herself unsure where to go, and wandered further, many of her girlhood’s muddy roads long since paved and worn down and paved again as they crisscrossed a Fódlan where her dearest ones lived only in legacies and libraries. Eventually, she found her way to Zanado, and dwelt in the canyons there for some years more. It had been a long debate between her and her wife when they were still young, still ruling, still writing laws, but she had won out eventually: Zanado and Lake Teutates and that strange temple Claude had found up north, the shrine by the shore in Rhodos, all decreed as cultural reserves—monuments of the war of unification, they had agreed to call them—to be left undisturbed in perpetuity. They had gathered all the remaining Crest Stones they could, all the Relics they could find, and re-interred them in secret deep in the Red Canyon, the bones of Byleth’s ancestors returned to a home that she had never known. She had made herself a little cottage near them, for some of those years, hoping to find some connection, some way to reach the people whose deaths her human family avenged deep in the dark at the Battle of Shambhala, a lifetime ago, but they did not share their names, or their stories. The remains of the Immaculate One had nothing to say. That cottage had crumbled, too, after a while.

Sometimes, she felt something strange in her chest, like a heavy stone. She’d had Linhardt look into it, once—or was it his daughter? There had been much muttered theorizing that, with the implanted Crest of Flames dissolved, her body was changing in ways it might have been meant to, might have originally if she had been permitted a childhood without the scars of heart surgery and no tears to shed. Her mother, Linhardt—it was almost certainly Linhardt—had pointed out, was Nabatean, even if she had never had the chance to grow into her power or develop a Crest of her own. And her father had been a first-generation Crest bearer, with Seiros’ legacy in his blood, that same blood that made the Crest of Flames viable in her own chest for so long. Maybe she had inherited Seiros’ Crest from him. Maybe she was inheriting what might have been her mother’s. Maybe, she would develop her own. At the time, Linhardt had frowned, pushing back graying hair tousled from a sleepless night of study, and pointed out that there was just so much they couldn’t know without any Nabateans around to talk to, any living examples of their biology to examine. She hadn’t understood, that day, why his eyes seemed so sad when he pointed out that at least they could predict she would live a long life.

After the palace at Enbarr, after the house in the hills by the sea, after the cottage in the ruins at Zanado, Byleth wandered north. Duscur, too, had been returned to its people by royal decree, and what few of them remained had founded new generations there. All of them who had known Dedue from their school days tried to ensure that the stigma he had endured would end, once the truth of Duscur's tragedy and the cruelty of their genocide became common knowledge, but Duscur's most famous son had done the unthinkable in one of the most famous battles of the war, and that was common knowledge, too. Duscur’s people had walked a long road to the chance to stand alongside their neighbors as equals, and even now, often kept to themselves. After everything they had been through, they had earned, at least, being left to govern their own destiny. It was in Duscur that she first heard the stories: of an ethereal young woman who lived alone in the north of the peninsula, who aided lost travelers and healed the sick, who guarded the wildflowers, whose eyes shone in the dark.

Her heart—was it stone? how long had it been stone?—leapt. Or it sank—she had a hard time telling the difference, sometimes. Centuries, now, with the same emotions her loved ones had shown her in her youth, only to find those same feelings alien again as that family’s generations moved on beyond her. It took months of following the stories, any rumor or folktale she could, and there she was.

The young woman sitting at the shore was taller than she remembered—tall as her father, tall as Rhea, taller than she was. She wore her pale green hair in a simple braid down her back, now, and a thick shawl around her narrow shoulders. She did not turn to meet Byleth’s approach, eyes held on the rushing surf, but called out, in a clear and familiar voice, “If you come closer, Professor, I shall only fly away again.”

She froze, straightened, unsure where to begin. “I—“ There was nothing right to say. “Hello, Flayn.”

“That was my name,” said the onetime saint, “long ago, when I knew you.”

“Cethleann, then.” She hadn’t pronounced either of those names aloud in so long. Byleth swallowed, her throat gone dry, as she blinked away the salt breeze in her eyes. She waited amid the swaying seagrass, then took another few steps closer. “It’s good to see you.” It was almost a question, and almost the surest thing she knew.

Did an hour pass? What was an hour, to either of them? Cethleann turned, finally, her face so like it had been in their school days that Byleth’s heart might have dissolved all over again. The face she had cradled, rescuing her from the reach of Agarthan knives in the dark. The face she had raised a sword to, only a few years later, full of shock and hurt, who had said they would never meet again. “Do you come to hunt us down again, Your Grace?”

She sighed, failing to collect her thoughts, and found a stone close by to sit on. Her old student did not get up to leave, which gave her some hope. “Never—I—we made sure you would be left alone—”

“I saw the decree, Your Grace.”

“Is—is your father well?”

“He is near. And none of your concern.”

She had forgotten the way her former student could sound when she was furious, after so many years remembering Flayn’s gentle heart foremost. She tried again: “I am sorry—”

Cethleann’s face softened a little; not forgiveness, perhaps, but weariness long beyond anger and grief. “I know. I do not know if it is enough, but I know.”

Byleth’s voice was soft, as it so often was in the presence of something sacred. “We avenged them. We avenged them and I brought them home, Cethleann.”

“And you killed Rhea, first.” A flush rose to the saint’s cheeks, still pale as porcelain. “You did not _know_ them, Byleth, as we did. You did not see them die in the first place. You fought alongside the Death Knight, after what he did to me. You made common cause with the ones who slaughtered our people, before you turned on them, and you killed Rhea, you and your Emperor.” Her voice was clipped, precise, laying down words that had gone undelivered for far too long.

She knew her face was the picture of helplessness. It had been so long since anyone outside herself had treated her as anything but a hero, for the betrayals and compromises of the war. It had been so long since anyone had said aloud what she had said to herself, too many times. Finally, all she had was the truth: “I loved her. I loved her, and we—when Rhea demanded that I—”

“Do you imagine that you are the only one who loved, Professor? Or lost?” That familiar voice was so terribly gentle, now, one of only a few voices she had ever heard carrying as many ages of grief as her own. 

No explanation could be enough in that moment, and Byleth did not try. But she did finally say, almost at a whisper, “You didn’t see her, at the end. She would have destroyed us all. We tried…” Her voice cracked and crumbled.

Cethleann tilted her head, as she had so often at the dinner table, in the classroom, in the dappled sunshine on the way to a sortie somewhere lost to memory. “I did not know then what Rhea had done, nor what she _would_ do. But neither, Professor, did _you_. You _or_ your Emperor.”

“But you stood by her!” Byleth burst out. “You _fought_ for her. As she ranted, as she killed. She lied to the continent for a thousand years, Cethleann. She kept people in misery and lack, she let the nobles run roughshod and slaughtered dissenters, she...” It was more words than she was used to saying, and they unraveled into gestures, and then faded into the air between them and the sound of the waves on the shore.

“Did you not also do dreadful things for the ones you loved?” Their eyes met, matched in their luminescence, both of them having done their weeping long since. But Byleth trembled, and her brows drew together as she searched vainly for some response. “She was our sister. Just as you are.”

It had been so long since her beloved’s hand had slipped from hers at last. Buried in red, behind a modest stone house in wildflower hills not unlike these, by a warmer shore so far to the south. It had been so long since those rooms had rung with laughter as the fireplace crackled and generations of little black cats curled up on the hearth. So long since the love that had launched a war for humanity’s liberation, and so long since those humans had taken the reins of a new world, and given it over to others, and others after them. So long since there had been anyone to remember with her. “I loved them,” she said again, at last. “I loved her. I didn’t know.”

“We would have been your family. We wished to be, Father and I.” 

“I’m sorry. We tried to make it right. We tried to make it better…”

“And in the end, unlike her, you let it go. So they have their world. And we are in it.” Cethleann leaned forward, looking through her, through the ocean between them and through her ribcage to the ocean inside and through to the ocean beyond. “Our lost sister. Our lost dragon sign.” She smoothed her hair over the sharply delicate ears she had hidden so diligently, in another time, and sighed. Her eyes, still as bright as jade, had welled up. The salt air, perhaps. “I might someday be ready for your apology. But I…thought I might do some fishing.”

Byleth looked up, her heart beating heavily in her chest, straightening where she sat. “Would it be all right if—if—”

“I thought you might join me, for a little while.”

They were together, there, at that shore, for a while. They passed the time.

**Author's Note:**

> Have I listened to Chvrches' "The Mother We Share" too many times? Probably.
> 
> When we don't have the living, sometimes ancestors are all we have to hold onto.


End file.
